It is not enlightenment, intellectual emancipation and breadth of worldview, which is promoted by the churches, but informational thraldom, dependency and a narrow sectarianism. What we have seen in the course of the twentieth century is the concerted and relentless dumbing down of the Christian church.
Right knowledge brings emancipation. This has always been understood by repressive and controlling institutions, whether political or religious. Thus also it is with the institutions of organised Christendom, all of which serve one principal function, namely to securely keep their flock within their respective fold. It is not the boundless liberty in Christ, but the thraldom of religious bondage, which constitutes the experience of most confessed Christians. A religion, as we understand, denotes a binding or covering of the soul – as in response to human spiritual nakedness occasioned in the primordial fall. What the established churches offer, however, is not the grace garment of divine revelation, but the man-made covering of creedal theology. It is not to the invisible Christ that the church is yoked – meaning, its people – but rather to organisational structures and hierarchies. As a most striking example of this, and surely one of the most emphatic manifestations of the biblical antichrist in modern times, pope Francis recently declared a spiritual relationship with Christ, outside of the mediation of the Church, a dangerous thing.
The attitude is endemic within organised religion, and we are unsurprised to learn that his institutional predecessors, employed despotic means of keeping the Bible from the common people. As decreed by the Council of Toulouse, 1229: ‘We prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament; but we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books.’ William Tyndale, who in 1536 was burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English, well understood the applicable rationale, stating: ‘The Church disallows owning or reading of the Bible in order to control the teachings and to enhance its own power and importance.’
This occurred in an age wherein discourse or information actually made a difference – to individuals, as to the course of nations – and indeed the newly invented printing press and resultant Gutenberg Bible contributed in significant measure to the overthrow of a tyrannical world order. While the strategies of control are perhaps more subtle today, given the wealth of information in the public domain, they are no less effective. For even today, upon centuries of religious retardation, congregations everywhere display the tight leash of informationally closed systems – and this not only within the Roman ‘mother organisation’, but all religious organisation.
Within this context of institutional control, however, it is impossible for the authentic faith to flourish. On the contrary, religious culture and tradition has done more than any other force in history to dissuade the wider public from the Christian Bible as the revealed Word of God. And although the people are exiting these systems in droves, intuitively recognising their spiritual bankruptcy, the exodus is rarely for the biblical green pastures of transcendent revelation. Indeed it is ranking clergy, typically among the first to recognise the absurdity of their position, which are leading the exodus from biblical verity into universalism, liberalism and religious eclecticism. Thus, by curious irony of historic reversal, it is the very dogmatists who formerly burned their fellows at the stake – their institutional successors, to be precise – who are now proclaiming, oh, it was all a mistake. Let us seek a more nuanced reading!
In short, it is not spiritual or intellectual maturity which is encouraged within the churches; it is not independence of thought or critical engagement across paradigm lines. The pervasive culture, rather, is one of intellectual infantilism, the spoon-feeding of a mealy-mouthed creedalism, in many cases reducible to the fundamentalism of mere semantic formulations – which is to say, to the idolatrous worship of empty words. Indeed the phenomenon may be observed throughout the wider culture. Within this new fundamentalism, this regression to magical modes of thought, it is words as such – not meaning or intent – which are deemed decisive. Within our postmodern conversational wasteland then, it is not so much the formal creed, but rather the constraint of political correctness which constitutes the intellectual straightjacket. The result is a new semantic tribalism, of mutually exclusive in-groups employing the ‘correct’ terminology. Within the Christian context it bespeaks a faith of cultural, rather than spiritual, determinants – and a spiritual body divided along cultural lines.
Indeed, resulting from this spiritual and intellectual infantilism is a Christian faith which is hardly worthy of that name. As in the case of overprotective childrearing, the modern Christian is typically insecure and unable to make his way in the world of ideas. Far from being established, confident and secure, upon the rock of revelation, we find such Christians vulnerable to even the flimsiest of critiques. Did we not hear of actual deconversions from the faith, occasioned by outings of the so-called new atheism – intellectually vacuous diatribes as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great (2007). And although a number of Christian apologists rose to respond, it was perceptive agnostics who, in no small measure, helped to redress the intellectual balance. As observed Princeton philosopher, David Berlinski, concerning atheism as the intellectual default within the modern secular West, it is an unthinking position ... atheists are typically flabbergasted to learn that their beliefs are paper-thin and their arguments generally puerile. Or, as the literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, in his 2010 Gifford Lectures, irreverently quipped concerning the phenomenon – they (the etiolated modern church) got the Ditchkins they deserve.
Yet most churchgoers do not even come anywhere near reading Hitchens or Dawkins. The culture, as stated, is of finality and intellectually closure. While there are exceptions, popular Christianity is replete with warnings of the dire consequences – nay, the terrible dangers – of exposure to the ‘wrong’ kind of literature. Here it is not so much secularism which is deemed the great threat, but rather religious eclecticism. A standing army of inquisitors has within its crosshairs not only the spiritually heterodox New Age, but nigh any religious position which might undermine an assumed spiritual orthodoxy. This also includes any Christian position which deviates from the purity of doctrine as held – only and exclusively, of course (!) – within the creed of one’s choice. Here it is surely a poignant irony that apologists for the respective doctrinal camps mutually undermine and negate each other’s position, fully rendering denominational Christianity the absurd spectacle which it is – which indeed it must be – in the eyes of a perceptive observer.
If one wonders why the Christian world must plummet into ever increasing sectarianism, the answer appears abundantly clear. It is that the principle of transcendent verity has been replaced by theological revisionism, each school effectively claiming that they – and only they – have a correct understanding. Intellectual hubris is the norm, instead of godly humility in the face of the incommensurate. A unifying principle is lacking in the church because divine providence and revelation have been abandoned for human endeavour and understanding. And indeed, as regards sectarian splintering, we have seen nothing yet – namely as the information content in the public domain is increasing exponentially, individual minds becoming ever more diversified, individuated and mutually estranged.
The institutional answer to this embarrassing situation, with the grand idea of unity at all costs, is to abandon meaningful discourse altogether. This is the position at which the European church has arrived, and indeed it is the inevitable outcome whenever a rationalised humanism takes the place of the transcendent faith. As observed in my Apocalypse (see adjacent book offer), once the notion of the transcendent is discarded, the inevitable historic and cultural momentum conforms to the sequence – humanism (or romanticism), existentialism, nihilism. The spiritual and cultural nihilism of the European church is thus the final phase of a centuries-long process, and a harbinger of what is to come globally.
The end of discourse – the dumbing down quite literally to the level of brute beasts – is thus, paradoxically, a long-term result of precisely that rational inquisition which was thought to bring intellectual emancipation (in the so-called Enlightenment) from what was deemed to be religious superstition. Today we understand that the precise opposite holds true. It was the cultural context of a profound Christian transcendentalism wherein – in Europe, and nowhere else – the scientific revolution took hold. Indeed we now understand that it is only in a context of a philosophical transcendentalism that rational intellect is able to flourish. In one of the most astonishing results of the twentieth century, this was demonstrated mathematically by the Princeton logician Kurt Gödel with his so-called incompleteness theorem. Briefly, this theorem states that in any formally consistent system there are axioms – or truths – which cannot be derived from within that system. One needs to transcend – to jump out of the system – in order to apprehend these truths. Conversely, it is a rationally ‘closed system’ which makes for intellectual entropy (or dumbing down), and ultimately leads to the nihilism which marks our cultural endgame.
And thus we are able to conclude these less than illustrious remarks with an insight that is actually profound. Concurrently we have been able to unify our two seemingly disparate notions of creedal denominationalism and a religious dumbing down, showing how the former actually determines the latter.